Back in the Wastelands

It's unusual for me to write about a game without actually getting round to finishing it, but 45 hours into Fallout: New Vegas and I wonder if I'll get round to doing so. So here's my thoughts so far.

Let's get the positives in first, or at least the main ones as there are too many to list. This is a huge game that can easily swallow up huge sections of your life. Fallout 3 was big, but this is a whole new level. There seems to be far, far more quests to get engaged in and more to explore, despite the Nevada wasteland area not being that much bigger surface-area wise than it's Capital equivalent.

The bods behind Fallout 3 and New Vegas have been sensible in one aspect by not changing too much in the new game. The controls and general look are essentially the same, which will be fine to most. Too many step forwards in one go isn't always the best thing - sometimes we just want a lot more of what we already know we like.

Perhaps expecting that the vast majority of players will have come from Fallout 3, rather than going through a tutorial of sorts, we're thrown right into the mix by having Matthew Perry shoot you - a humble courier for a delivery company - in the head. Obviously. this is going to put a crimp in anyone's day. Luckily, you put on your lucky kex that morning and after being dug from your shallow grave by a passing robot (who thinks it's a cowboy), you're stitched back up a local doctor and sent on your way.

As with Fallout 3, the game world is the setting for a battleground between two groups: here, it's the New California Republic (NCR), who have expanded eastward from the early games, and Caesar's Legion, a cult of personality who like crucifying and enslaving folk they don't like. But there's also a few more groups out there you can ignore, work for or happily hunt and slaughter, such as the Great Khans, the Powder Gangers and the Followers of the Apocalypse. The Brotherhood of Steel are also hiding somewhere in the Wastes, and that's before you consider the plans of the enigmatic Mr House, who rules over the New Vegas Strip.

Though the Karma system is still in place, it's your relations with these gangs that will determine how safely you get around. Keep pissing off the NCR, for example, and it'll get to the point where you feel the full force of their military might, which is a lot more of a hassle than if you cheese off the relatively small and badly equipped Powder Gangers.

Travelling, working and socialising through the Wasteland and Vegas is an enjoyable experience and it doesn't take much encouragement to spend hours veering off the main storyline (i.e. finding out why you were shot in the bonce) to help out the people you meet. Or being a cold-blooded psycho, if you feel so inclined. The feel is helped by the quality of voice casting, with Kris Kristofferson, William Sadler and Michael Dorn featuring, the latter reprising a character he played in Fallout 2. Ron Pearlman, of course, is back as the narrator.

But, but, but, in this gamer's experience, at the exact point things started to get interesting, the bugs kicked in big time. The gamebreaker is my now inability to walk down the Vegas Strip without the game crashing, which is tricky when that location is the heart of the entire game. I've also found two side-quests to be impossible to complete due to bugs. This is on top of other random crashes that are just plain irritating - the biggies are inexcusable.

I'm sure there may be patches to fix these, and I'll have to lug my PS3 round to a friend's house to try and get them downloaded, but it still strikes me as a bit rubbish for a game to be released that seemed so obviously not ready to be so. It's in big danger of turning what could be one of my all-time favourites into an all-time disappointment.